Alan is a cybersecurity and data privacy attorney who works with companies to develop new and innovative ways to collect, share, use and safeguard the information they control. This includes assisting with website and application development involving tracking technologies, cookies, data collection, storage and use.
Alan also works with clients to develop internal programs which comply with applicable security and privacy regulations; drafting data use, transference and data use or sharing agreements; ensuring that data subject privacy notices on websites and applications that collect consumer information comply with all applicable regulations; and working with companies to implement processes and procedures to comply with information requests from data subjects.
Alan also works with companies seeking to merge publicly available information with information voluntarily provided by data subjects to develop new and useful insights that drive better products and services for these organizations, while also developing strategy around managing the privacy issues raised by this practice.
The specific regulations he addresses most frequently are federal laws such as DFARS/CMMC, Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, and FERPA; international laws such as Europe’s GDPR or PEPIDA; U.S. state laws such as California’s CCPA/CPRA, Colorado’s CPA, and Virginia’s VCDPA; and the laws involving regulators such as New York's Department of Financial Services, Department of Defense and the Office of Human Rights. In addition to these regulations, Alan also helps companies seeking certifications such as SOC2, ISO 27001 or NIST.
Alan frequently works with companies adopting Artificial Intelligence into operations and helps them navigate the legal, ethical, regulatory and business challenges raised by AI so they can innovate safely and with confidence.
Security and privacy practices can, and do, fail. Alan helps organizations plan for this with table-top exercises around such common incidents as ransomware, compromised email accounts or a breach involving a vendor that provides services to your accounts. When organizations do suffer an event, Alan helps with the incident response. He routinely works with forensic consultants to help identify, scope, mitigate and remediate the effects of a breach and with negotiators to address ransom demands; provides opinions and draft notices to affected individuals and customers; represents clients appearing before regulators; and handles claims where the incident involves a breach of a contractual duty concerning how the data was intended to be managed.
With a Bachelor of Science in Computers and his legal background, Alan understands both the technology and legal requirements associated with security and privacy incidents, communicates these issues to relevant stakeholders and achieves a fast resolution to any dispute.
Areas of focus: Cybersecurity, data privacy agreements, breach coaching, artificial intelligence, development of policies and procedures to help organizations make the most of the information they control.
Information Governance
Alan works with organizations to develop information governance policies. This includes preparing organizations for a potential regulatory or legal action, developing policies to safeguard important business transactions, and helping organizations comply with government and industry standards when developing best practices to manage and retain documents. Alan also assists organizations with information management relating to the development of document management strategies, retention policies and the development of disaster recovery plans.
E-Discovery
Alan is experienced in all phases of the electronic discovery process. He and his group, which includes forensically trained IT professionals, routinely help organizations with the identification and preservation of potentially relevant content, as well as collecting, reviewing and producing it for the requesting party. He is a pioneer in the use of predictive coding to cost-effectively and quickly identify responsive documents for early case assessment and review purposes. He has been lecturing and writing on this subject for several years. He also has developed sampling methods used to test key word searches and to validate coding decisions.
Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Defense
In the tort arena, Alan focuses his practice primarily on litigation involving technology and pharmaceutical products. He has defended manufacturers of chemical or pharmaceutical products in products liability claims brought as class actions, multi-district litigation and statewide consolidations, or as individual suits involving cancer, cardiac and pulmonary defects, birth defects and other systemic injuries. He has also acted as national counsel, local counsel and science counsel for numerous companies.